The Bizarre Truth
Page 20
The Djemaa has been a gathering place for all of Morocco for centuries. It’s got a sordid past—even as late as the nineteenth century the square was primarily used for beheadings—but every single evening, 365 days a year at five on the dot, the space is transformed from an orange juice vendors paradise to a phenomenal food festival. This is the place to catch a real slice of traditional Moroccan life. It’s the best way to see this country and its people. You’ll learn more about Morocco spending one night in the Djemaa and the Souk than you will strolling the museums or touring the antiquities by carriage. Trust me, it’s a lot more fun than hanging out at the hotel pool.
Andrew hunts down some fresh tuna
off the shores of Samoa’s Nu’utele Island
before gearing up for the giant fruit bat hunt.
Nature’s Candy
The Achachairu
hen it comes to global cuisine, I’ve tasted it all. Whole roasted sparrows in Vietnam, stinky tofu in Taiwan, a glass of warm steer’s blood in Uganda, deer penis soup in Singapore. As the Cantonese say, “Anything that walks, swims, crawls, or flies with its back to heaven is edible.” I can tell you firsthand, the Cantonese are onto something. Considering the range of crazy foods I’ve eaten in my lifetime, it might shock you to know that my most memorable food experiences involve fruits. This certainly shocked the hell out of me. I never would have guessed that my most thrilling food moments would come in the form of a juicy bite of fruit. Whether it’s rare and exotic or ridiculously plentiful, you can’t beat fruit grown in the ideal environment, picked at the right time. It’s nature’s candy.
Mangosteens were the first exotic fruit that opened up a world of new ideas for me. Often referred to as the queen of all fruits, mangosteens are universally well regarded for their sweet, succulent flavor. It’s like eating a sorcerer’s blend of honey blossoms and wildflowers ingeniously mated with the sweetest melon. These small, round fruits have a sturdy green stem and a firm, purple, husky exterior. Place the fruit between your hands, making sure to not crush the delicious center to smithereens, press your palms together, and crack the spongy, fibrous shell. Inside, you’ll uncover eight or nine misshapen segments around a central core or pit. It’s not entirely unlike a snow-white mandarin orange. Sweet and juicy, and once you take a bite, you can’t stop. What makes them extra special is their relative scarcity around the world outside of their growing zones. The small mites that live inside their thick skins make these fruits next to impossible to transport, and attempts to cultivate the fruit in similar climates, like Hawaii, California, and Florida, have failed miserably. While I wish we all had better access to this incredible fruit, there is something to be said for only being able to eat it while in a specific area of the world. Why? Because when it comes to food, I believe in eating with the seasons. Can’t enjoy a summer tomato unless you eat beans and stew all winter long. And in the age of the jet plane and in a time when all our lives are built around instant gratification, it’s nice to have something to look forward to when you travel.
When you think about perfect fruit-growing climates, an arid, African desert does not come to mind. However, one of the most interesting fruits I’ve ever tasted hails from Botswana’s Kalahari Desert. The marula trees drop yellow, golf ball—size fruit, which sun-ripen (rot, actually) on the ground. Marula, with an extremely tart frontal assault and a sweet finish, is not only a Bushman favorite but popular with the kudu and baboons as well. Unearthing the small bit of fruit is an involved process. First, you bite through the rind, remove the cap, then squeeze the fruit from the end. The marula pops into your mouth like an oversized lychee. Suck out the sweet-sour flesh and spit out the big seed—but don’t throw it away. When roasted and dried, this seed can be cracked open and eaten. For thousands of years, marula nuts have been one of the five primary staples of the Bushman’s diet. I savor the simple pleasure of walking through the desert, ten marula fruits in hand, snacking on them as juice streams down my face and hands. SweetTarts never tasted so good.
As I ate my first marula fruit, it brought me right back to Santa Cruz, Bolivia, where I first tasted my favorite fruit of all time. For twenty years, I measured everything against the mangosteen. Tree-ripened apricots from the mountains a day’s ride outside Marrakesh, Morocco, placed a close second. That is, until both were trumped by the achachairu.
Compared to the stark, cold, and brown lunar landscapes that sweep most of Bolivia, Santa Cruz is a lush tropical paradise. Serving as the country’s gateway to the Amazon, this area teems with amazing produce and wildlife. We headed to Yacapani, an even smaller town in the area that boasts a restaurant whose reputation for serving some of the world’s best fish and roasted armadillo reached me all the way back in America. Some people love licorice, beef jerky, or ice cream on road trips, but to me nothing accompanies a long, dusty car ride quite like fresh fruit. I’m always on the lookout for roadside fruit stands. Taking out your penknife and cutting into a fresh papaya, melon, or bunch of bananas on a road trip is my idea of heaven.
The first fruit stand we encountered outside of Santa Cruz was filled with watermelon, avocado, and baskets of a strange citrus fruit. However, the stand looked a little down on its luck. There is nothing more disappointing than fruit that is not up to snuff—I’d rather eat my Puma sneakers than a mealy pear or a flavorless melon. My driver assured me there would be more stands along the road. Sure enough, we pulled over at a gem of a place ten minutes later. Mesh baskets hung from the wooden edge of the lean-to that protected the fruit from the hot noonday sun. At first glance, the baskets looked to be full of small lemons or limes. Upon closer inspection, I realized I’d never seen anything like it: pale orange in color, some almost flaming red, and figlike in appearance, with a harder, leathery skin, much like the marula fruit.
“It’s called an achachairu,” the vendor explained. “It’s a fruit.” Sounded more like a sneeze to me, but I purchased a small bag anyhow. I was smitten.
Attacking a foreign fruit can be complicated business. It’s very crucial for the neophyte to ask how to eat it. Imagine diving into a coconut, pineapple, or banana without any guidance. Do you bite into it like an apple from the orchard? Peel it like an orange? Like the marula fruit, fresh lychee, and rambutans, achachairu flesh must be opened in order to access the fruit, but instead of a tidbit of white flesh surrounding a large nut, it’s the exact opposite. The skin is rather thin compared to its cousins’, so slipping the fruit out is a much easier endeavor. Inside, you will find a huge bite of the most delicious floral, sour symphony of flavors, which explodes into your mouth.
Advice to exotic-fruit lovers: Never ever, ever, ever buy a small piece of fruit for a couple of pennies and get back in the car. And don’t ever drive away in a hurry—especially when you have yet to sample your purchase. If it’s disappointing to your palate, you haven’t lost anything. No matter where you taste the purchase, at the curb or an hour’s drive away, you’re going to dispose of it if you don’t like it, or stop eating it, or give it to someone else who is going to enjoy it, probably in reverse order. But if it’s new to you and you love it, you’re going to want to eat a lot of it. I always sample on the curb.
One bite of achachairu sent me into a frenzy. They came in little one-kilo bags with roughly twenty fruits inside. I bought three bags and finished them within hours. That night, I ventured to the village market, bought three more bags, and brought them back to the room. I pounded those down in a day. On the way back to the airport, I bought five more bags. By this time, I had convinced the crew that maybe they would want to eat some, and over the course of the next couple hours we demolished three of the bags. Just before we headed to the airport, I made a pit stop for a few more bags. My passion for fruit knows no bounds. I ate two more bags in the airport. If I could have taken them back to La Paz, I would have. Sadly, I couldn’t buy enough, couldn’t hold enough, and couldn’t bring enough onto the airplane. I was eating every single piece of achachairu that I could.
Pleasant Surprises
A Gallimaufry
alling in love, landing the perfect job, starting a family—the greatest things in life seem to happen when you least expect them. Experiencing food and culture is no different. I see it on the road all the time. Sure, there’s huge hype over a lot of the strange things I eat and experience on the road. Paint a thousand pictures and no one ever calls you an artist, but eat one bug on one show and you will forever be labeled the Bug Guy. On the other hand, I will also never forget cooking with Nobu Matsuhisa on two continents or my personal, one-on-one crash course in molecular gastronomy with famed French scientist Herve This. However, I anticipated greatness in these situations. It’s the times when my expectations are low that I find the most pleasant surprises.
Since childhood, I’ve dreamed of seeing the Great Barrier Reef in Cairns, Australia. When I had the opportunity to travel there as an adult, I regressed back to that giddy little kid staring out the window of my New York City apartment, dreaming of the world. Surfing, sharks, amazing snorkeling—what’s not to love? Few more incredible natural structures exist than this reef that rims almost the entire northern coast of the Australian landmass.
I was stunned to discover just how far offshore the reef is located. Operators run giant diving barges with semipermanent structures floating above the reef, which support the massive influx of annual visitors ferried in and out. There is no question about it: Pressure on a reef kills it. Activity in the water equals damage. The growth of the shipping lanes and commercial fishing, combined with the environmental circumstances of global warming, have resulted in a less productive and less vibrant reef. That being said, the Great Barrier Reef is one of the top ten attractions in the world, as far as I’m concerned. My palms were sweating as we boarded our boat in Cairns for the two-hour drive to our dive spot.
When it comes to describing Australians, “crazy” seems to be just part of their psychological makeup. Everyone has sort of a screw loose, and I mean that in a really beautiful way. My diving companion was a gentleman named Lurch. He was a crazy Australian if there ever was one, a carefree guy who spent his formative years on the water. His family made their living on the water, and he’s stuck with the family business, resulting in days filled with free diving for fish equipped with only a mask, an incredible oversize spear gun in hand, and a pair of flippers. We finally arrived at our diving spot, where Lurch instructed me to start putting on my gear. As I dealt with my equipment, Lurch gave me a fifteen-minute tour of the shark bites and moray eel stings that covered his body (I think this an intimidation technique, which, frankly, kind of worked). However, this was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and I didn’t have time to freak out, so over the side we went.
Lurch and I have the same idea of a good time. We spent a couple of hours in the water, pulling up as many shellfish, crustaceans, and mollusks as we could. We headed to a deserted island, fired up the “barbie,” and ate. We got a giant coral trout for the grill and a beautiful Spanish mackerel, but the real star of our lunch was a rainbow crayfish—or a proper rainbow crayfish, as Lurch likes to say.
Often referred to as painted lobsters, these creatures are actually members of the crayfish family. When I hear the name “crayfish” I think of some mud bug down in Louisiana, boiled with a mess of corn, potatoes, sausage, garlic, and onions. This is one of my favorite food treats, and I was expecting to experience the Down Under versions with the hundreds of crayfish we were to collect that day. Lurch kept looking under these giant rock over-hangings in about eighteen to twenty feet of water, where most of the hefty ones live. He pulled out the first couple, showed them to me under water, and signaled that they were too small to keep. I was stunned. These crayfish were the length of my arm, with a tail as big as my forearm. These were no mud bugs; they looked like giant tropical lobsters, complete with brilliant blue, red, and orange flanging all along their exoskeletal armor.
I’ve seen tropical lobsters before, usually in the Caribbean, where they are camouflaged to disguise themselves in the sand and dark rock of their environment. They need to blend in with earth tones and shadow—hence all the brown, black, and sometimes sandy orange color displayed on their shells. The rainbow crayfish, however, live in rocky recesses not necessarily all the way down on the ocean floor, but sometimes midway on the reef itself. Consequently, they live in a vibrantly colored environment, their shells becoming a canvas for some of the most beautiful hues in the animal kingdom.
Lurch finally found one big rainbow crayfish, weighing in at about two and a half kilos. This massive beast was lunch. I’m a New England lobster guy and just assumed this lobster was going to be roasted whole. Lurch had another idea. He brought a small pan to put on top of the grill. Next, he dabbed a tablespoon of butter in it, twisted off the lobster tail, cut the tip of the tail off the rear fin flaps, pushed this giant two-pound raw lobster steak out of the tube of skeleton that it lives in, chopped it into one-inch chunks, and panfried the meat in browned butter, finishing it off with a generous squirt of lemon.
We sat there on the beach while the Spanish mackerel, the king-fish, and the coral trout cooked. I tolerate warm-water lobster. The North Atlantic Homarus americanus is my kind of crustacean. However, the second-best lobster I’ve ever had is that rainbow crayfish from the Great Barrier Reef. Taxonomists can take issue with this—I know that technically it’s a crayfish. But to me, anything that frickin’ big, that tastes and looks so much like a lobster, is getting called a lobster.
Rainbow crays are one of those delicious foods that you can find only down in Australia and some of the island countries just north of it. They have them in Indonesia and Okinawa, Japan, but physically plucking them from the Great Barrier Reef with a man who has spent his lifetime diving there is an experience I wish for everyone.
Samoa also offered up some pleasant surprises in the food department. Samoa is a food lover’s paradise. People still live very much in an old-fashioned, timeless manner. It’s extremely remote, and many of the simple ways of life that have all but vanished in other parts of the world are still alive and kicking in this South Pacific region. Men stroll the towns barefoot, decked in lavalavas, an island sarong that is comfy in the extreme
No matter how primitive a country, markets are a barometer experience against which you can measure the best aspects of a culture. In Samoa, the markets serve as a place for licensed vendors to set up small booths—no matter how humble; sometimes it’s just two stumps of wood and a plank put across them—for them to vend their product. It may be as simple as hawking bananas, but they still pay a license to the Market Co-op setup business. However, there’s a time of day at Apia’s Maketi Fou Market when anyone can bring their fresh catch and sell it. It’s almost like an amateur section of the market where you can find a random assortment of sea creatures.
The Samoan island of Upolu is surrounded by a massive reef that stretches anywhere from a hundred yards to as far as a mile out from the beach. Beyond that, the water quickly drops off. The inland side of the reef reaches a depth of 60 feet tops, whereas the outer side of the reef drops to 400 or 500 feet immediately. Within another quarter mile you’re at 1,000 feet, and in another quarter mile you’re at 3,000 feet. The channels around there are just spectacular, a
nd the depth creates a strong current ideal for attracting big game fish, including tuna.
Samoans head out in small canoes fitted with outriggers and paddle past the reef through sometimes fifteen- or twenty-foot seas. Somehow, they manage to use hand lines while dealing with these incredible currents in a boat thinner than a kayak. They will put two or three tuna into their boat, sometimes ten-pounders, sometimes fifty-pounders. If they live in a well-traveled section of town, they’ll hang their catch from the trees near their homes. Some people will even collect root vegetables or oranges, bananas, and papayas and set them next to the fish. A ten-pound tuna will cost you a few dollars; fruit is a quarter apiece. You won’t believe how cheaply you can put together the lunch of your dreams.
For those who don’t live in a high-traffic area, hawking fish at the Maketi Fou is the best option for making a buck. Fishermen set up in the amateur section of the market, where a few empty tables are always available. The fishermen stand by their fish, scribbling the price on a piece of cardboard or the inside of a matchbook and perching it on the fish itself. Some even write the price on the fins with a marker. This setup may be bare-bones, but it’s as fresh as it gets. It’s the type of tuna that you would pay hundreds of dollars for in a restaurant in New York or Tokyo. Every Samoan restaurant serves tuna, raw and cooked. It’s inescapable. It’s more ubiquitous than the hamburger is in the United States. For just a couple dollars, you can have platters of freshly sliced tuna that has never seen the inside of a refrigerator. Giant tuna schools populate the area surrounding the island, and there is really no formal means to export it. Tuna is sort of the poor man’s food of the island, but one they know the limited population of visitors really gets excited about—quite a unique system, since in the rest of the world the tuna economy has turned this fish into one of the most exclusive ingredients on the planet.